Can't Capture with Premiere 6

[Some Guy]

Help! I've been searching everywhere for help with capturing DV with Premiere 6. I have a Canon ZR10 DV cam, OHCI campatible firewire card, Premiere 6, P3 with a GB of RAM, 80GB main drive and 240 GB RAID array. My Canon shows up properly under imaging devices as a "Microsoft DV Camera and VCR". Premiere can see the Canon and control the camera momentarily when I press play in the capture window, but then the preview starts showing digital noise and freezes. (The Canon still plays the tape but there's no preview in Premiere) When I try to record in Premiere I get a an error: The capture device is not available. Is my camcorder fried? Can anyone suggest a course of troubleshooting? I have a lot of footage but no way to capture it to start editing. Thanks in advance.

[Ray Austin]

What OS you using?

What motherboard?

P3 what?

What kind of raid card?

How are your scratch disks set?

Video card?

Etc, etc.

[Some Guy]

Oops...
I'm running Win2K with the latest service pack.
Motherboard & CPU is an Asus P3B-F with a P3 850E(which had no trouble running my RT-2000 before it died)
My RAID card is a Promise FastTrak 100 with 2x WD 120GB caviar HDs.
Video card is a Matrox G450.
I have Captured Movies, Video & Audio Previews in separate folders on the RAID array.
Is there anything else I should list?

[KRSESQ]

Can you beg, borrow or steal another DV camcorder to test it with? That should be the fastest way to determine whether its the computer or the Canon.

The computer you described should handle it, although I personally would be reluctant to run Win2K on anything under a 1 GHz processor (but that's just me).

How much RAM? Have you run Docmemory on it recently?

Kevin

[Ray Austin]

Some guy,

Other than what Kevin said about trying another cam. [which wouldn't be a bad idea.]

Do you have any programs running in the background? Virus checkers etc? These should all be shut off/ disabled. Additionally power management should be shut off. You should already know these things with using the RT2000.

If you have an additional harddrive attached to the motherboard... like on IDE2 master for example... try to capture to it and avoid the raid card as a test. [ Don't forget the scratch disk settings inside Premiere.]

Also check to see if the Fasttrack is using a different IRQ than the firewire card you may have to uninstall/ reinstall and move one card or the other to another PCI slot. Windows 2000 can usually have more than one on the same IRQ and be ok, but it would be better if you could get them on separate IRQ's.

Additionally take out a stick or 2 of ram as a test. drop down to 512MB if possible as a test and try again.

Your system should be capable no problem. I had a similar system with the RT2000... PIII 800mhz Dual CPU.

Some other things to check/ try.... get the latest drivers for all your devices especially video card drivers. When it comes to the fast track lower the PCI utilization inside the fasttrack software utility.

[Some Guy]

Well, I've tried everything with no luck. It must be my dvcam. I don't know anyone who has a dvcam so I'm out of luck until I can afford to buy a new one. Can anyone recommend a good mini-dvcam? What about Panasonic? (I've had enough of Canon) Thanks to everyone for all your help.

[mits]

Hi,
before you throw away your dv-cam have you tried to capture with a different program (like sceneanalyzer live)? Remember to turn on the cam before starting the capture program.